Janet Franklin | |
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| Born | 8 July 1959  (age 63)Frankfurt |
| Occupation | Geographer, biologist |
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Janet Franklin (born July 8, 1959 in Frankfurt, Germany [1] ) is an American geographer, botanist, and landscape ecologist. Her work is centered on the use of remote sensing to model and understand vegetated landscapes. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biogeography in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside. [2]
Franklin grew up near San Francisco. [1] She received a B.A. in Environmental Biology from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1979. Subsequently, she received a master's degree from UCSB in Geography in 1983, and finally a PhD from the same institution in 1988. [3] Her thesis focused on the remote sensing of woody vegetation structures in Mali. [4] [5]
Franklin received her start in remote sensing as a doctoral candidate when she was recruited by a professor on the basis of her ability to distinguish different species of pine tree from aerial photographs. [6]
In 1988, Franklin began teaching and researching at San Diego State University, where she remained until 2009. Her 1995 paper, Predictive vegetation mapping: geographic modeling of biospatial patterns in relation to environmental gradients, is considered a foundational work of modern, remote sensing-based landscape ecology. In 2009, she was appointed as a professor of geography at Arizona State University, becoming a Regent's Professor in 2015. [7] From 2014 to 2016, she was president of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology. [1] Some of her research has focused on island ecosystems in the West Indies and Polynesia. In 2017, she was appointed to the University of California Riverside. [2]
Franklin's work focuses on the use of remote sensing techniques to model and understand vegetated landscapes. [6] She has made significant contributions to the study of human-caused landscape change and predictive vegetation mapping. [8] [9] In recent years, much of her work has focused on climate change, both present and historical. [10] [11] [12]
Franklin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences [1] and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also the current editor-in-chief of Diversity & Distributions, a highly ranked journal on conservation biogeography.
Franklin is the author of one book and over 120 peer-reviewed academic papers. [3]
Physical geography is one of the three main branches of geography. Physical geography is the branch of natural science which deals with the processes and patterns in the natural environment such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. This focus is in contrast with the branch of human geography, which focuses on the built environment, and technical geography, which focuses on using, studying, and creating tools to obtain,analyze, interpret, and understand spatial information. The three branches have significant overlap, however.
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants. Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals. Mycogeography is the branch that studies distribution of fungi, such as mushrooms.
Ecological classification or ecological typology is the classification of land or water into geographical units that represent variation in one or more ecological features. Traditional approaches focus on geology, topography, biogeography, soils, vegetation, climate conditions, living species, habitats, water resources, and sometimes also anthropic factors. Most approaches pursue the cartographical delineation or regionalisation of distinct areas for mapping and planning.
Vegetation is an assemblage of plant species and the ground cover they provide. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular taxa, life forms, structure, spatial extent, or any other specific botanical or geographic characteristics. It is broader than the term flora which refers to species composition. Perhaps the closest synonym is plant community, but vegetation can, and often does, refer to a wider range of spatial scales than that term does, including scales as large as the global. Primeval redwood forests, coastal mangrove stands, sphagnum bogs, desert soil crusts, roadside weed patches, wheat fields, cultivated gardens and lawns; all are encompassed by the term vegetation.
Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Concisely, landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity.
Geoinformatics is the science and the technology which develops and uses information science infrastructure to address the problems of geography, cartography, geosciences and related branches of science and engineering, such as surveying.
Digital soil mapping (DSM) in soil science, also referred to as predictive soil mapping or pedometric mapping, is the computer-assisted production of digital maps of soil types and soil properties. Soil mapping, in general, involves the creation and population of spatial soil information by the use of field and laboratory observational methods coupled with spatial and non-spatial soil inference systems.
Geomorphometry, or geomorphometrics, is the science and practice of measuring the characteristics of terrain, the shape of the surface of the Earth, and the effects of this surface form on human and natural geography. It gathers various mathematical, statistical and image processing techniques that can be used to quantify morphological, hydrological, ecological and other aspects of a land surface. Common synonyms for geomorphometry are geomorphological analysis, terrain morphometry, terrain analysis, and land surface analysis. Geomorphometrics is the discipline based on the computational measures of the geometry, topography and shape of the Earth's horizons, and their temporal change. This is a major component of geographic information systems (GIS) and other software tools for spatial analysis.
Eman Ghoneim is an Egyptian/American geomorphologist. In March 2006, Dr. Ghoneim, together with Farouk El-Baz, discovered the Kebira Crater, a possible impact crater (astrobleme) in the Sahara. In 2007, while processing microwave space data, she discovered an ancient Mega-Lake (30,750 km2) buried beneath the sand of the Great Sahara in Northern Darfur, Sudan.
Species distribution modelling (SDM), also known as environmental(or ecological) niche modelling (ENM), habitat modelling, predictive habitat distribution modelling, and range mapping uses computer algorithms to predict the distribution of a species across geographic space and time using environmental data. The environmental data are most often climate data (e.g. temperature, precipitation), but can include other variables such as soil type, water depth, and land cover. SDMs are used in several research areas in conservation biology, ecology and evolution. These models can be used to understand how environmental conditions influence the occurrence or abundance of a species, and for predictive purposes (ecological forecasting). Predictions from an SDM may be of a species’ future distribution under climate change, a species’ past distribution in order to assess evolutionary relationships, or the potential future distribution of an invasive species. Predictions of current and/or future habitat suitability can be useful for management applications (e.g. reintroduction or translocation of vulnerable species, reserve placement in anticipation of climate change).
Pedometric mapping, or statistical soil mapping, is data-driven generation of soil property and class maps that is based on use of statistical methods. Its main objectives are to predict values of some soil variable at unobserved locations, and to access the uncertainty of that estimate using statistical inference i.e. statistically optimal approaches. From the application point of view, its main objective is to accurately predict response of a soil-plant ecosystem to various soil management strategies—that is, to generate maps of soil properties and soil classes that can be used for other environmental models and decision-making. It is largely based on applying geostatistics in soil science, and other statistical methods used in pedometrics.
Ecosystem Functional Type (EFT) is an ecological concept to characterize ecosystem functioning. Ecosystem Functional Types are defined as groups of ecosystems or patches of the land surface that share similar dynamics of matter and energy exchanges between the biota and the physical environment. The EFT concept is analogous to the Plant Functional Types (PFTs) concept, but defined at a higher level of the biological organization. As plant species can be grouped according to common functional characteristics, ecosystems can be grouped according to their common functional behavior.
Barbara Koch is a Professor of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems at the University of Freiburg, Germany. When she took this position, Koch became the youngest and first female professor at the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the Albert -Ludwigs University in Freiburg.
Crystal A. Kolden is an Associate Professor of Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from Clark University. She is an expert in fire sciences. She started her career as a wildfire fighter, but has since become a professor specializing in wildfire behavior.
Keith Charles Clarke is a professor of Analytical Cartography and Modelling in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Monica Mary Cole was an English geographer and lecturer. She was appointed geography lecturer at the University of Cape Town in 1947 before joining the staff of the University of the Witwatersrand's Department of Geography the following year. Cole became a senior lecturer at Keele University in 1951 and was appointed Chair of Geography at her alma mater Bedford College, London in 1964. She resigned her position in 1975 and was made Director of Research in Geobotany, Terrain Analysis, and Related Resource Use, which she held until her retirement in 1987. Cole was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Murchison Award in 1987. Following her death, the society established a research travel grant in her name, from funding left to it by her.
Catherine Nakalembe is an Ugandan remote sensing scientist and an associate research professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the Department of Geographical Sciences and the NASA Harvest Africa program Director. Her research includes drought, agriculture and food security.
Susan Ustin is an American earth scientist who is the Distinguished Professor of Environmental Resource Science at the John Muir Institute for the Environment, University of California, Davis. Her research makes use of remote sensing technology to understand the characteristics of plant communities.
Land change science refers to the interdisciplinary study of changes in climate, land use, and land cover. Land change science specifically seeks to evaluate patterns, processes, and consequences in changes in land use and cover over time. The purpose of land change science is to contribute to existing knowledge of climate change and to the development of sustainable resource management and land use policy. The field is informed by a number of related disciplines, such as remote sensing, landscape ecology, and political ecology, and uses a broad range of methods to evaluate the patterns and processes that underlie land cover change. Land change science addresses land use as a coupled human-environment system to understand the impacts of interconnected environmental and social issues, including deforestation and urbanization.
Applications of machine learning in earth sciences include geological mapping, gas leakage detection and geological features identification. Machine learning (ML) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computer systems to classify, cluster, identify and analyze vast and complex sets of data while eliminating the need for explicit instructions and programming. Earth science is the study of the origin, evolution, and future of the planet Earth. The Earth system can be subdivided into four major components including the solid earth, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere.
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